How Are Organizations Taking Initiative in the Fight for Access to Medicines?
- Lili Meng, Roham Amid, Si Yi Zhang, Victoria Chou & Victoria Lun
- Jan 31, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 28, 2023
Access to medicines continues to be a global issue. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this was further exacerbated with vaccine supply concerns and inequitable access to potential therapies to reduce the severity of symptoms and improve health outcomes. Many organizations have begun to focus on the importance of striving for equitable access to medicines, and leveraging their resources and reputation to do so. In this month's article, three companies and organizations have been chosen to highlight their respective initiatives and promises to improve access to medicines globally: Access to Medicine Foundation, World Health Organization, Johnson & Johnson. Lastly, an article published in the BMC Medicine Journal focusing on how COVID-19 pushed for new access to medicines initiatives from global organizations is summarized.
World Health Organization
By 2030, UN members hope to achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential healthcare, as well as access to safe, effective, and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for everyone. This will help those worldwide who cannot afford out-of-pocket health costs, meaning WHO must strategically work alongside national health development policies and pharmaceutical systems to coordinate the production of safe, effective, and affordable medicines.
Overall, to effectively achieve global access to medicines, WHO’s framework for national action involves 4 key features:
1. Sustainable financing: by securing public and external funding to reduce out-of-pocket spending
2. Reliable supply of quality products: by implementing quality regulatory controls via collaboration with various regions and networks
3. Affordability and availability: by monitoring/negotiating prices and encouraging feasible local production wherever possible
4. Appropriate and responsible use: by creating national treatment guidelines with incentives to produce the most safe, effective, and affordable medicines while preventing inappropriate use
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Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson’s focus on equitable access to medicines and healthcare is evident in their consistent high ranking on the Access to Medicine Index (ATMI), a report card that grades the world’s pharmaceutical companies to assess their efforts in supporting accessibility of medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics to low- and middle-income countries. Some of Johnson & Johnson’s effort on equitable medical care has been seen in their work highlighted below:
1. Allocated doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine candidate to underserved populations
In fall of 2020, J&J signed the landmark Communique on Expanded Global Access along with 15 other life sciences companies to ensure accessibility of 500 million doses of its investigational COVID-19 vaccine candidate to vulnerable people in all countries.
2. Development and distribution of an Ebola virus vaccine
J&J accelerated their efforts in developing an Ebola vaccine in 2014 during the lethal outbreak of Ebola in southern Guinea. During a subsequent outbreak in 2018 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, J&J donated its vaccines to various global partners to support a clinical study conducted near the outbreak zone. J&J continued its efforts by distributing its vaccines to those in high-risk zones.
3. Detecting and treating tuberculosis
J&J created a decade long initiative towards ending the global tuberculosis (TB) epidemic by 2030. The plan includes expanding access to its multidrug-resistant TB and ensuring distribution of its drug to countries with high rates of TB.
4. Vaccine and treatments for HIV
Two large clinical trials by J&J are underway in investigating potential vaccine regimes for HIV, involving populations who are disproportionally vulnerable to the virus. In addition, in December of 2020, J&J received approval from The European Commission for the first long-acting injectable treatment –received one a month or every other month– to provide an alternative treatment regime from the daily pills.
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Access to Medicine Foundation
The Access to Medicine Foundation’s key findings include:
Only 7% of pharmaceutical companies' R&D is spent towards children under 12, despite needs for pediatric treatment options.
Years of warning were made about the potential devastating impacts of novel coronaviruses, however, R&D spendings remained unchanged in response to these claims.
Less than half of key products are covered by access strategies in poorer countries, and low-income countries are overlooked when pharma companies apply equitable pricing.
Companies are spending R&D money to adapt existing vaccines to low-income countries. The pharmaceutical industries adaptation projects amount to 48% of total projects.
Companies have 43 adaptive vaccine R&D projects for diseases in scope. Adaptive R&D projects for multivalent vaccines are the most common, followed by temperature-stability projects.
30% of adaptive R&D projects involve multivalent vaccines. The remaining 28% of adaptive R&D projects focus on either characterizing or improving the temperature stability of a vaccine, and 44% target a range of other improvements, including in efficacy, immunization schedules, yield of production, or formulations to allow for easier administration.
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BMC Medicine
With the global pandemic, the risk of circulated falsified health products and substandard medicines has increased tremendously to meet the new demand for access to essential medicines and other health commodities. These concerns are approached by organizations aimed to enhance access to COVID-19 treatments and reinforce safeguards to ensure COVID-19 related therapies and medicines are safe, effective, and are of high quality.
More specifically, organizations such as UNITAID have established Medicines Patent Pool to help reduce costs of medicines through voluntary licensing, and UN members planning to promote global access to medical supplies for COVID-19 by adopting a resolution via international cooperations. Furthermore, WHO’s framework on the project of COVID-19 Access Pool to voluntarily share IP, scientific data and health technology-related knowledge provides equal opportunities for people around the world to gain insight about this pandemic and have equal chances to fight it.
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